GTX 680 Sli help

Recently I built a brand new computer the specs are i7-3770k 3.5Ghz (I have not OC'd yet), 16gigs of DDR3 ram, 2 GTX 680's , and 1000w power supply.

I found when playing WoW I turn around to face a part of the screen that has a large amount of particle effects and the frames go from 133 to 30-40, I figure that something must be wrong for a game like WoW to make 2 680's drop 100 frames. I benchmarked the cards just a few minutes ago using Unigine Heaven and the average frame rate was 94.5, I also updated the drivers yesterday and the only other game that makes my frames go down is Guild Wars 2 I have no idea why those games cause problems when Skyrim, BF3, and other games that have better graphics and physics don't.

If anyone could shed some light on what might be going on I would appreciate it.

You will never hey an O.C. high enough to make you feel like your GTX 680's are working properly. Infact that rig in wow terms was a waste of money it wont produce any better in a real raid setting than a pc w/ a 660 ti. You have a BF3/Metro rig do it up.

Everyone always seems to think Metro is more intensive than it really is. It's really just a glitch in the 3D settings that makes it generate twice the amount of frames in 2D mode. If you disable that, it ends up being not even close to on par with something like BF3.

But yeah OP, if that rig's primary intention was WoW, then you spent a lot of money you didn't need to. Basically anything after something along the lines of a 3570k and a 570 or 660ti isn't going to get you much more in the way of performance. It's an old game, running on an old, inefficient engine. Overclocking would help a bit, but you're still going to be bottlenecked by the software, and then the CPU, in the end.

WoW, including dev time, is a game that's over a decade old. SLI wasn't terribly popular when WoW released, and it was never built with something like dual vid cards in mind, plus its an MMO, which will always be CPU dependent over GPU, so in essence if you built that thing for WoW, you've wasted a considerable amount of money. however, if you like BF3, Metro, etc you've got a super dope rig, lol

Even if you're into BF3 and other intensive titles, that's still overkill with the i7 unless you use it for something other than gaming. Hell, it's still overkill with the 2 680s unless you're running on multiple monitors or at an insane resolution.

You will never hey an O.C. high enough to make you feel like your GTX 680's are working properly. Infact that rig in wow terms was a waste of money it wont produce any better in a real raid setting than a pc w/ a 660 ti. You have a BF3/Metro rig do it up.

So I should just not play WoW because my computer is not good enough for it?

I run with shadows on "low" because I find them distracting while raiding.

I run them @ low because they look like crap, they are not the shadows from say BF3 or Crysis ya know they are big blocky squares of junk. In my view they take more away from the game than they add to it. On low they are actually more realistic to me.

MMO's have a lot of networked synchronization involved for everything from other players to NPC's, from weather to nodes, etc. This information is received by your system, and updated in memory. If a new character or such appears, then it is created in memory rather than being updated. However, all of this reading and writing of RAM is done by the CPU. In areas that are mostly empty, there's same amount of sync is done, but since there's less entities around, there's less work for the CPU (because there's less to read and write to RAM). In crowded areas, there's more for the CPU to do and thus FPS suffers.

The reason that Skyrim runs so well is precisely because there's no network sync. The reason BF3 runs so well is because there's less sync than with an MMO. For the same reason above though, this is why your FPS will drop when you're in an area where there's a lot of fighting going on. 64-player Metro Conquest is a great example, especially inside. However, inside, your GPU has to do less work than when in outdoor areas as there's less to render (no sense of extreme distance). In outdoor maps, people are typically spread all over and thus these 64-player firefights are rare.

So, it's nothing wrong with your system. It's merely a limitation that can't be avoided due to the nature of MMO's, and to the way memory related functions are handled by the CPU.

As an example, when i made a piece of software some months ago (WinFlare), i had a list of IP addresses (retrieved over the network, but not done dynamically). Each item in the list was an object that took up memory space. This is the nature of software and isn't something that can be changed. There were (up to) 2000 items in this list. That's 2000 objects. Inside each item, there were additional items, such as an image (used for indication purposes), a rectangle (again, used as a different indicator), a rounded rectangle (another indicator), and 2 labels.

So, each item, essentially had 5 items inside it. That's 10000 objects total, but add 2000 more for the actual "parent items" themselves, and you've got 12000 objects in memory. The application interface was accelerated by the GPU (DirectX based). Even on both GTX580 SLI, and a GTX670, the FPS of the interface was very low. It's for the reason that dealing with that amount of objects is a struggle for almost any system. Adding more CPU cores won't help and adding a better GPU does nothing. Adding more RAM does nothing as you've still got plenty of RAM free. It's a "limitation" of software development. When you add real-time network sync to it, you're adding another point that the system has to wait on. Of course, WoW will rarely have anywhere near 12000 objects within visible range (and they can offload some things to VRAM such as sprites and merely use a reference to that within the applications process space).

Essentially, there's very little you can do to improve FPS in heavy areas once you reach a midrange system.

Essentially, there's very little you can do to improve FPS in heavy areas once you reach a midrange system.

The little you can do is overclock the CPU and make it work better with the said things (hopefully). You could maybe bump that minimum fps of 30-40 to stay above 40 if you used something like 4.5-4.8GHz overclock. Doesn't sound like a lot probably but it just might be the difference between noticeable fps drop and something you can't notice. And turn the shadows down a notch from ultra to high.